Intersection Ideagen
Exclusive Ideagen Blog Talk Radio Interviews
Kent Bradley: SVP, Chief Medical Officer at Safeway
For those who are not familiar with Safeway, can you please explain your role within the company?
Bradley: Safeway is a national grocery company, with a couple companies underneath it. Its core business is to provide support for its 1,500 stores located in 20 different states. My role within that is to support internal health initiatives. Most of the time, I am viewed as a consultant both to our business units that are business facing, as well as internally to our own employees and team members to support the health and wellbeing of each member of the team.
On Safeway health’s website, you mention the ‘triple aim’: Can you please explain the three aspects to this overall aim, and how they are connected to each other?
Bradley: Triple aim came out of the perspective of around how we need to improve the health of the population, improve the member experience and the experience of care as well as decrease the cost of care. I view it almost as a metaphor. We can all relate to driving on the highway and being stuck and I think, what are the ways that we can fix this experience? If the highway is disease onslaught then how do we improve the population’s health? The next piece of this is experience, when we are in the traffic jam, the experience is usually not pleasant, so how do we keep traffic moving and for the patient experience, how to we improve the experience for the patients themselves. How do we reduce costs, how do we get les cars on the road, how do we improve the flow? Doing so will create greater efficiencies and reduce the volume of people
needing the services.
Safeway Health is changing the landscape of healthcare in the workplace. Can you please go into further detail about the mission of Safeway’s Market Priced Drug Program?
Bradley: We are moving from healthcare to health with a greater focus on prevention and wellbeing. Safeway’s Market Priced Drug program actually focuses less on that aspect and more on transparency and the role of a market pricing mechanism that allows for on the lowest cost and highest value alternative that is incentivized and chosen. There are drugs that are equal efficacy and incentivizing individuals to choose the highest value lowest cost option, which may not be the option that is supported traditionally in the pharmacy area.
How does each Safeway department collaborate to generate success for the entire company?
Bradley: I think it starts with the culture. Culture can drive innovation and success. The culture is around being open to ideas and collaboration. There are also structural things, we set up a health task force that has cross business units meet on a quarterly basis that discusses what we are doing, which provides critical importance of situational awareness that drives alignment. This whole concept of unity of efforts is really important in the business. When you are able to T-up what everyone is doing across the organization as it relates to help, then you are able to focus effort and find out how one department is able to help another department. I think that in any large organization being able to structuring the opportunity to highlight what each department is doing and driving towards certain metrics of success is critical.
is able to help another department. I think that in any large organization being able to structure the opportunity to highlight what each department is doing and drive towards certain metrics of success is critical.
What needs to be done to make individuals across the world even more resilient? How can all the different sectors further promote resiliency’s importance?
Bradley: When you talk about different sectors, we focus on individual aspects that focus on individual skills and the refining of how we do things. But when you talk about sectors, I think there are determinants of health that are outside the individuals that the sectors need to begin to focus on. We have to look at the determinants of health outside of the individual, the environmental and social determinants. How are we building the education system and the design of cities that allows individuals to increase their internal capacity? That is going to be an interesting topic to explore: the intersection of these determinants of health along with creating more resilient communities.
7 Magazine / October 2014